Turn that Brown Upside Down
Katie Bethune-Leamen – 2015
“Engaging with a colour and palette new to the artist—brown—this installation brings together a wide range of material from porcelain sculpture and masks and neon work to digitally printed fabric, silkscreen, and found objects”
Modern Fuel is very pleased to present turn that brown upside down, an installation of new and recent sculpture and 2D work by Toronto-based artist Katie Bethune-Leamen. Engaging with a colour and palette new to the artist—brown—this installation brings together a wide range of material from porcelain sculpture and masks and neon work to digitally printed fabric, silkscreen, and found objects. Turn that brown upside down extends an ongoing exploration of the language and form of contemporary abstraction, the location of identity as related to masks, and our relations with objects and each other.
About the Artist
Katie Bethune-Leamen—
Katie Bethune-Leamen works in sculpture, installation, and video. Her practice considers the nature of objects, our relationships with them and our relationships with each other as mediated through objects. She is interested in the inchoate and the abstract—amorphous things subsisting in an in-between state—as location for engagement and possibility for meanings.
Recent solo exhibitions include: YOU WIN! (8-11), Hologram Tupac. Other Things. ALL-ONE! (OpenStudio), Shiny, Object, Person. (AGO), the commissioned project Blobs for Lawren Harris’s Glaciers, Icebergs, and Unknown Things (AGO) and participation in the group exhibitions Northern Exposure (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia), and More Than Two (Let It Make Itself) (The Power Plant). Recent residencies include Fogo Island Arts, and SIM (Reykjavik, IS) with upcoming ones including the Canada Council for the Arts International Residency—Paris, and as artist-in-residence at NSCAD. She is a 2015 recipient of a Chalmers Fellowship Grant to research sculptural abstraction through travel in Japan, Germany, Italy & the USA. She received her BFA from Concordia University, and her MFA from the University of Guelph.